chapter sixty-five
STARLIGHT BALLROOM
June 2012
I was roaming the periphery of the Starlight Ballroom, trying, with all of my visual might, to make out the faces of former classmates hanging in clusters around the room. All attendees of the reunion at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel had their high school yearbook photos pinned in prominent places on their persons, and thank God for that. Father Time, with his habit of multiplying chins, subtracting hair from the top of heads while adding adipose to midsections, had been of no use in helping me recognize old friends. Most of us had not seen each other since 1960 when we’d marched across the stage of the Hollywood Bowl to Pomp and Circumstance to receive our diplomas.
At the Starlight Ballroom on reunion night, the music was provided by a homegrown group, The Four Preps, one of our claims to fame. I didn’t know the guys; they were in my brother’s class and first got together to perform in the 1956 Hollywood High talent show. They sounded great, even without the deep voice of tall Eddie Cobb or the high tenor of Marv Ingram—both of whom had been replaced by younger men after they died in 1999.
My eyes landed on one face that looked almost exactly the same as his yearbook photo: Stephen Kay. No extra chins or adipose on Steve. He was the same tall, lean, erect guy—if anything, more erect—that he’d been in high school but, as I’d discovered in our more recent contact, he now wore an armor of righteousness that hadn’t been there when we were teenagers.
When I first talked to him after embarking on my Leslie and Pat journey, I’d assumed he could help me flesh out the women, help me understand who they’d been and who they’d become. I didn’t yet know about his laser focus on only one part of that: who they’d been. He not only had no interest in who they’d become, he was hostile to the very idea that they had changed in any way.
The more time I spent at the prison the less contact I had with Steve, and I knew that once I decided to write a letter to the parole board supporting Leslie’s release I was sure he’d believe that I had been naive, seduced by her dangerous charm. I also assumed he would see it as a betrayal of him. As a result, I’d been apprehensive about encountering him at the reunion.
But there he was and there I was and there we were talking courteously. He introduced me to his wife, who was lovely and cordial. I knew he had officially retired and that he no longer attended parole hearings. He told me that he was now working on cold cases. I’d read that one of those cases was the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Steve Hodel, a former LAPD homicide detective turned private investigator, had asked Steve for help after his own investigation into the grisly unsolved crime convinced him that his own father, psychiatrist George Hodel, had murdered the victim, twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose tortured and mutilated body was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. An account of this is detailed in Hodel’s book, The Black Dahlia Avenger, including his relationship with Stephen Kay.
We chatted about cold cases and then about the mutual friends we had seen that night, and then there was a lull in the conversation.
“So . . . you’ve spent time with Leslie.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve gotten to know her pretty well.”
I couldn’t think of anything more to say. Apparently, neither could he. Another silence.
Before I realized it, I was enveloped by some sort of altered state. Perhaps it was the romantic lighting that created a dreamy atmosphere. The soft light erased the harshness in Steve’s face and relaxed his bearing. He looked like the affable, sweet boy I’d known in high school. Or maybe it was the music. The Four Preps had just finished singing “26 Miles” (“Twenty-six miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me”), a song about love and hope, and now they were singing “Big Man” (“You were a big man yesterday, but boy, you ought to see me now”), a song about regret.
I felt expansive and sentimental and in that moment I believed anything was possible.
“Steve,” I said, “I have an idea.”
He said nothing. He simply stared at me, waiting. I was waiting, too—waiting for the idea to fully hatch. I thought about how Steve Hodel had described Steve Kay: “a stand-up guy.” And I thought about how every once in a while 60 Minutes has a segment on a district attorney who, years after prosecuting a criminal, advocates for him or her, either because of new evidence pointing to the individual’s innocence or because of a dramatic transformation.
“Now that you don’t have any official role,” I said, “you could get to know Leslie. You wouldn’t have to tell anyone. You could just go and visit.” I knew Leslie well enough to know that she wouldn’t exploit such a visit for her own gain. I truly believed that.
“Why in the world would I want to do that?” he said. The soft lighting wasn’t soft enough to disguise the look of horror on his face.
“If nothing else, wouldn’t it be interesting? In all these years you’ve only talked to her in front of the parole panel. It’s adversarial. . . you can’t get to know someone that way.” I reminded him that he once said that of the three women, Leslie was the one he thought could someday be released.
“That was before she married that guy. It showed how bad her judgment is.”
“Steve, that was in 1981.” I swept my arm across the aging crowd in the ballroom—the paunches, the gray hair, the wrinkles. “Don’t you think we’ve all changed in the past thirty years?”
He smiled, a tight and not particularly friendly smile. I realized that approach would never work. He was suspicious of change. He views all of Leslie’s progress as one long manipulation; the more people in the outside world, no matter how distinguished, who vouch for her, the more entrenched his opposition. In Steve’s world, it’s all a ruse, a veneer.
As I searched my brain to come up with another argument, he pulled out what he considered his heaviest artillery. “You have to remember,” he said, “they wanted to start a race war.”
I don’t know if my mouth flew open, but I was surprised enough that it might have. The obsessive, nonsensical fixation of this remark astonished me. Not because I hadn’t heard it before. I had. But not for a few years so I had assumed he’d dropped that argument. For decades he’d been quoted as saying that he would never let up on these people because they wanted to destroy society in a race war and have hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered. But somehow, I thought that his fury about Leslie’s short, bad marriage, which seemed to intensify every decade, had supplanted it.
Steve is a nice guy, a decent person, a smart man, but there’s lunacy to this. The race war was part of Manson’s delusional system, a psychosis one psychiatrist at the first trial characterized as a folie a famille because it engulfed the whole group. Remember the grand plan? They would leave a wallet from the LaBianca house in a gas station in a black neighborhood, the blacks would be blamed for the murder of the LaBiancas, and years and years of repressed rage would explode and result in a massive race war. The Manson group would escape the bedlam by driving their dune buggies into the hole in the earth in Death Valley to wait it out. A golden rope would lower them, dune buggies and all, into the bottomless pit, a kind of Shangri-la where none of them would age. They would wait out the race war in this paradise and then re-emerge after the troubles were over. The blacks, now victorious, would immediately see them as allies, and because Manson believed that blacks were inferior and incapable of governing, they would enlist him and his band of loonies, with their superior knowledge and wisdom, to lead the country. The Family would move from Shangri-la to the White House.
My expression must have communicated my incredulity.
“Sure, it might have been unrealistic,” he said, “but that doesn’t matter. What counts is that they wanted to.”
In Steve’s static world consistency is the premier virtue, and from that vantage point, Manson is the one worthy of trust. The first time he said this to me, I thought he was kidding because he had a smile on his face. But then he said it again. This time he wasn’t smiling, but I got the feeling that he was pleased by the surprise on my face. Like the race war argument, this was a position he had held for a very long time. I came across a May 14, 1989, article in the Los Angeles Times where, in talking about the three women and Tex, Steve explained to the reporter why, of all of the former members of the Manson Family, it was Charles Manson who earned his respect.
“Charlie has changed so little over the years,” Steve said to me with, though faint, an unmistakable look of fondness on his face. “He’s basically the same old Charlie.”